Exhibit Focus: Anti-semitism

TEMPLE

February 26, 1999|By JAMES D. DAVIS Religion Editor

A snake with a hooked nose, curly sideburns and yarmulke squeezes the life out of an eagle. Jews with red hands kill children for their blood. A bulls-eye announces a Web site for white-supremacist, anti-Semitic messages.Hatred of Jews isn't pretty, especially across a thousand-year period. But someone has to tell the story, the Anti-Defamation League thinks. Hence a new exhibit to open on Tuesday in North Miami Beach.

"Anti-Semitism Past and Present," created by a Dutch scholar, tells of prejudice both inside and outside church circles. The 30 panels of pictures and text, which were displayed for six weeks in Delray Beach, will spend two weeks at the Michael-Ann Russell Jewish Community Center starting on Tuesday.

"It shows Jewish communities in their glory and their destruction. And the capacity of Jews to be resilient in the face of terrible discrimination, and even demonization.

"Featured are posters, such as one from Austria showing a stereotyped Jew as a snake strangling an eagle. There are yellow stars and bands, going back to early medieval times in Italy. The show features a jacket festooned with a variety of symbols such as swastikas as well as the lightning bolt insignia of Hitler's dreaded SS. Also shown are recurring church-produced images of Jews on donkeys, next to Christians on lions -- an image repeated on stained glass, even sculptures.

ADL added a segment on anti-Semitism in America. There's Father Charles Coughlin, the bigoted radio priest of the 1930s. There's Stormfront, a pro-Nazi Web site based in West Palm Beach. There's a Ku Klux Klan Christmas card in Florida, offering "Best wishes for a white Christmas."

And there's the story of Leo Frank, a Georgia resident lynched by the Klan in the murder of a woman. That lynching, in 1913, was in fact a major spur to the founding of the ADL, says Bill Rothchild, Palm Beach County director. The exhibit was created by Joke Kniesmeijer, a researcher for the Anne Frank Foundation in Amsterdam. She is also the creator for the "French Children of the Holocaust" exhibit, which ADL brought to South Florida last year.

Throughout the exhibit, several themes of anti-Semitism emerge:Ugly caricatures, with Jews consistently drawn with hooked noses, pointed beards and thick, smirking lips.

Conspiracy theories, alleging that a secret Jewish society manipulated politics and economics with the aim of world domination.

Religious anti-Semitism -- including the "blood libel,'' which claimed that Jews actually killed Christian children and mixed their blood into Passover matzo.

Recycling of some slurs. The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a notorious forgery by czarist Russian secret police, is displayed in a 1934 French edition, in Arabic from Cairo in 1972 -- and in post-Soviet Russia in 1992.In Delray Beach, the ADL surrounded the exhibit with a symposium of Holocaust survivors, including people rescued by industrialist Oskar Schindler.

People's reaction? "Anger," Rothchild says. "They asked if history could repeat itself, and how to prevent it."

"We found that many of them were reminded that even in a technologically advanced and presumably religious nation, such as Germany, good people must stand guard against the evil of bigotry," Teitelbaum says.